Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucivax!gateway From: jym@mica.berkeley.edu (Jym Dyer) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: racism/sexism in all of us Message-ID: Date: 30 Apr 91 23:38:31 GMT References: Organization: Berserkeley Lines: 49 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: blanche.ics.uci.edu > I think that as I white, I am racist at some times. I have > to consciously work against this subconscious bias. ___ __ You are speaking for yourself. > I think that we all are sexist and racist to some degree. ___ __ And now you aren't. You really can't say what "we all" _ are like, because you have to take individual variation into account. ___ __ Let me give an example, but first a tad of developmental _ psychology: a scientist named Piaget discovered that children's minds go through stages of development. At one of these stages, the mind simply cannot accept a contradiction. Hold that thought . . . ___ __ Another idea in developmental psychology has to do with _ memory and learning: the "schemata" model. The idea is that incoming data has to be organized to fit in with the data that's in there already. One consequence of this is that information learned early ends up supporting the "weight" of all the related information that gets learned later. ___ __ Onward to the example: Imagine a child, a white male child, _ in fact, who was fed racist and sexist information when at the developmental stage where his mind can't handle any contradictions. Imagine that that child had had first-hand positive experience with members of the races and sexes, and that those experiences directly contradicted the information. Hmmmm . . . ___ __ Now suppose that, instead of his mind accepting "black people _ are bad" and "boys are better than girls" at that early age, it instead accepted "people who say `black people are bad' are wrong" and "people who say `boys are better than girls' are wrong." Now imagine this child growing up, and builds his schemata on those precepts. By luck, a burgeoning civil rights and mainstream feminist movement offer egalitarian principles to rationalize these early beliefs, just in time for the developmental stage where the mind wants these ration- alizations. ___ __ That person is very lucky, because racism and sexism seem very _ unnatural to him. They contradict his schema and his rational processes. The subconscious bias works the other way. ___ __ I know this, because that's what happened to me. <_Jym_>